Mobile, the City That Survived Everything

There is a phrase you hear in Mobile that other Southern cities do not use about themselves: that Mobile is a city that has survived everything. The claim has evidence behind it.

Founded in seventeen hundred and two as the capital of French Louisiana, it was the first permanent European settlement west of the Appalachians to endure. It outlasted yellow fever epidemics that killed nearly one in three residents in epidemic years. It transferred between five sovereign nations without ever being burned to the ground. It was not bombarded during the Civil War's siege of its harbor. It absorbed half a million war workers in less than three years during the Second World War and did not collapse under the strain. A Category Four hurricane dismantled the Gulf Shore communities in nineteen seventy-nine and left Mobile battered but standing.

What accounts for the durability is probably the water. Mobile sits at the head of Mobile Bay, which connects to the Gulf of Mexico, which connects to everything. The city exists because the bay is a natural deep harbor, and because the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers funnel the agricultural and timber production of the entire interior Southeast down to it. Every empire that held it recognized that geography. The French built a fort here. The Spanish held it for thirty-three years. The cotton merchants of the antebellum era made it the second-largest cotton export port in the country. The federal government built warships here during two world wars.

The population of Mobile proper today is roughly two hundred thousand, making it a medium-sized American city by most measures. But its history is not medium-sized. It contains the first Mardi Gras in the United States, the last slave ship to arrive in America, the naval battle whose outcome sealed the Confederacy's fate, and the civil lawsuit that bankrupted the Klan. Not many cities that size can make that list.